


Anatomy I

by LittleSister



Category: Masters of Sex
Genre: F/M, I'm sorry I completely forgot lester and helen's last names, and gini is mostly just lizzy, and i use a lot of words WHAT A GREATER SURPRISE STILL, and she sings what a great surprise, betty is awesome as always, in which bill is will graham jessica jones and sherlock rolled into a ball, in which i just shove every character in, small parts tho
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-02
Updated: 2016-01-02
Packaged: 2018-05-11 04:03:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5613271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleSister/pseuds/LittleSister
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So, this is kind of a present day AU where Bill is a brooding, lone-wolf surgeon with a wild imagination and a soft spot for music, and Gini is in a band called Asterion with George, Lester and Helen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anatomy I

The sound of his heavy steps thumps and drags uncomfortably along the dark wooden floor of the pub. It's pitiful, unpleasant and familiar, like he's Animal Control and the soles of his shoes are the poor little doggies whining in the back of his van as he takes them to their cells, or, in this case, up to one of the barstools. Bill's stomach twists as the metaphor settles into his mind and he looks down at his feet, chewing some more on the thought, on the dry bitterness it leaves over his tongue before he moves his lips to order.

"Gin & tonic", calls the young bartender as she absent-mindedly sets his glass in front of him, the faintest hint of a carefully contained southern drawl.   
"Texas?"   
He lays the question quietly, without looking up from his drink as he stirs it, ice clinking brightly in the muffled chatter of the room.  
"Alabama", she replies after shooting him a brief look and one incredulous raised eyebrow that she wasn't quick enough to hold down.   
She looks like a 50's pin-up, blonde hair perfectly curled and lips painted a rich red, lashes long and her top showing just enough to make a man want to stretch his neck to see if he can take a peak down the rabbit hole. There's a studied, evidently practiced flirty air in her eyes as she leans over the bar, forearms pressed into the polished wood, brows slightly pushed together when she asks  
"How could you tell?"   
Bill's brain floods with all the little observations he could make: her posture, the way she walks, the shape of her jaw and nose and the dated strength, the strictness that oozes from her stand, how easily she carries herself among the drunkenness and the slurs and the misery. Bill looks at her and sees the dry heat bending the air above boiling tar, he sees her running around and scraping her knees on hard, naked ground, feels the rush of blood to innocent cheeks the first time a girl holds her hand at school. Bill sees her cheek an angry red again, finger marked this time, then the sickening purple turning green as her eyes turn colder, sharper, and her hands rougher, knees scraping on dirty floors for uglier reasons now. Bill feels the weight of a shotgun in his hands and the ring of the blow inside his skull, warm blood staining smooth, still bruised cheeks that are not his.   
He looks into the girl's eyes as his identity settles back into him, cuts the thin ropes that let him be her for a second and a lifetime, there. He casts his eyes back down.  
"What's your name?"   
"Betty"  
"Well, Betty, I have incredibly good ears and you have no interest in men. But don't worry, I don't require courting to keep drinking, you know."

One hour later, Bill is four drinks in, his skull feels heavy and still unbearably sharp as he relives the catastrophic surgery he performed mere hours earlier: 57 years old male, South Korean, multi-organ failure after being put under the wrong medication because of a wrong diagnosis by the wrong specialist he was sent to by the wrong specialist he consulted in the fists place. He must have piled more wrongness on top of all that, obviously, because he couldn't save him. Thirty years of spending most of his days elbow deep in human pulp and he's still the fool who can't accept death. Christ.  
He has devoted his vitality, his social skills, his body and thoughts to medicine, to the promise of snatching dying bones back from death's hands, knowing, year after year, that he was slowly detaching himself from the prospect of a hearth and pets and family vacations with smiling/screeching tiny creatures who would have inherited his thick black curls and quick temper. He didn't mind: he still carried around the marks of his father's crooked love for him, pale reminders that he knew better than to breed.   
He always had the inconvenient gift of a wild, raging imagination, which he developed during the rough years he had spent, throughout his childhood, trying to avoid the undeniable, protruding brutality of his situation as long as he could. He started carefully observing people, drinking in all the small details that could potentially mean nothing, and building stories around them. He never lost the peculiarly childish ability to evoke images against the back of his eyes, painting fragments of history from the contextualization of day to day gestures, something that, oddly enough, drove him further from the crowd, made him an empathetic, distant bystander.

And yet, with all his trademark adolescent disgust with mankind, he couldn’t help the sharp tugs he felt inside his chest every time he came into contact with sufferance: as time went by, he realized it wasn’t just compassion and the stinging need to put a stop to any sort of pain he could, it was also a strange sort of fascination with the pureness that pain imposed on any human being. Men and women, of every age, color and provenance, all were the same when caught between the dire fangs of pain, and they could no longer keep wearing their masks. That was his epiphany: beneath the skin, the perfect machinery of the human body cannot lie, and all the wonders mankind was able to achieve were built around that original, atavistic mechanism.

The only thing he allowed himself to keep, after he moved away from home at 14, was his love for the sky: as a kid, when the only friend who would always stick by him was a throbbing pain in his cheekbone/ribs/wherever his father felt appropriate, he would always sneak out of his room and past his backyard, be it night or day, and roam around until he found the quietest place he could manage, then lay on the ground and stare at whatever was above him: swirling grey clouds, deep blue, crescent Moon, blazing sun and the almighty sincerity of the stars. Back home, he would thrash around in his bed and dream of himself flying above it all, but flying with his back to the Earth because he had no interest in seeing what was below him, he just wanted to get higher and higher and higher and when he woke up, his heart would hurt way more than his body.

At eighteen, at last, he had earned enough money to buy his first hang-glider, and his first time in the air was the baptism to life he could never find in the dull, primal release of sex.

Still, every time nights like this come along, Bill can't escape the gaping hole of his loneliness: there's no talking around it, no philosophical escape possible, and though he knows alcohol can't hide the thoughts spinning through his mind, he gives it a try anyways. He always does. And people have the courage to say he should be more optimistic, tsk.   
It's around ten p.m. when bill's attention idly shifts to a man standing on the tiny stage at the far end from where Bill's sitting: he's tapping a microphone and looks oddly out of place, standing among the seedy furniture, tall in his decent looking suit, big but not built, blatantly a stranger to physical labor with grey,  slicked back, balding hair.   
He introduces a band of which the name Bill misses, too distracted by the somehow melodious rasp of the man's voice, summoning the ghost of a pat on his shoulder and the sound of shared, warm laughs that fades as he walks away in the scarce clapping that follows.

Four people walk onstage with a bizarre combination of musical instruments: the drummer's a rather short, barrel-chested, smug looking guy, carrying a cajon, a tuft of thick black hair elegantly tamed down on his head, smooth and shiny. A lanky, nervous looking young man follows him, struggling with the cello in his arms, shoving his wide rectangular glasses back up on his nose. Two girls walk up behind them, both dark haired, one carrying a violin and the other holding a semi acoustic guitar by its neck, one clad in a plain, dark green dress, fairly high heels at her feet, the other wearing a bordeaux button down shirt that matches the color of her doctor Martens boots, black skinny jeans clinging to lean but visibly strong legs.

It's the cello player who introduces the band, a shift in his apparently coy demeanor as he firmly walks up to his mic and claims the focus of the half empty room.   
"Hi ladies and gentlemen, my name is Lester and we’re Asterion. Thanks for being here and we hope you enjoy the show. Our first song was written and originally performed by Hooverphonic."  
Bill knows the band Lester is talking about, as he knows that one of the girls is gonna be the singer and that it's most likely going to be the one with the cherry red Gibson 335 hanging from her shoulders, and a small shiver runs down his spine and slightly shakes his shoulders. He follows the presumed singer’s gaze down to her feet as her male band mates start up the song. The violin then sweeps in like the wind would from a breach in a window, subtle and vital, unfurling in the space around Bill's neck as he taps his fist on the bar, silently calling for one more drink, his back inadvertently straightening, posture alert like a Pointer’s.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Author's note: the song is Mad about you, the orchestra version. Go give it a listen, it really sets the mood right!  
> In case you didn't know, Pointer is a dog breed (i wasn't sure myself and I looked it up, the more you know!)


End file.
